


grace under pressure

by Kypros



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Bad Parenting, Child Abuse, Childhood Friends, Gen, Homophobic Language, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Misogyny, Light Angst, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Reconciliation, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 15:34:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20677742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kypros/pseuds/Kypros
Summary: He thinks about his life—his twin life, the life he wore like an ill-fitting tee-shirt over his old one. Like a sagging, second skin, trying and failing to be miserablytoughandcooland yes, you got it: a Harrington. A real man. And men don’t cry. Steve Harrington lives a life divided.





	grace under pressure

There is an unpleasant, self-deprecating sort of inanity in the pain of hating who you are (what you are, what you are to become—_wait_—you have already become it) because your birth was a mistake that you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to correct.

Steve Harrington blocks it out and keeps on living.

A part of him wants out of the labels. A part of him doesn’t want his whole life crammed into suffocating, reprehensible, cursory, impalpable words. _Be a man_. _Toughen up. Boys don’t cry. You’re a Harrington. _The last one hurts the most.

He understands why people do it—why people label things, quietly and tritely and unthinkingly—because each and everyone one of them all liked order. It was the logical thing to do. The human thing to do. They all liked making sense of things, and they all liked shoving people into neat, little categorical boxes with words like “pretty” and “smart” and “dumb” and “weirdo” and “loser” and—

He feels sick because people aren’t neat. People aren’t neat (no, people as a whole are messy, and emotional, and liars, and not at all _neat_) and people aren’t and never will be anything as simple as one singular, ambiguously mischaracterized word.

Steve doesn’t want it. He wants something, to_ be_ someone else. Something transcendent of the stupid little boxes that categorically set his brain on fire every time he catches himself doing it. He wants to be an individual. Someone different. But he doesn’t know what it is, or how to get there, but it’s something that’s not _this. _

When he was seven years old, his mother caught him holding hands with the Byers boy who lived up the road.

Right now, Steve knows that there is something missing. He wishes he was born as someone else, somewhere else, and with nothing more than a dulling all-consuming ignorance.

Boys don’t hold hands with other boys. Boys don’t flinch when their fathers hit them. Boys don’t cry. Harrington’s aren’t queer.

Steve is seventeen, or maybe eighteen, or maybe he is twelve, but he’s a bully now, and he uses his pseudo-machismo as a coping mechanism to justify every single word that his father has beat into him over the years. Because Sally deserved it, _and_ Peter’s a freak, _and_ Harry was just asking for it—

He regrets everything he’s ever done. But this is who he is. This is what his parents said he will be when he was seven years old (hard and mean and _a man,_ dammit), and that was that.

(Things like love and softness don’t exist, not in his world—not in the realm of Steve Harrington—and there’s nothing wrong with forcing a child into a role they don’t want to play).

But as he lays in the alley way, watching through the blood of his swollen eyes as Jonathan Byers rails his face with his fist for the third time (or maybe it was the forth, the fifth—), and his brain starts to catch fire again (look at this _freak, _this fucking _weirdo, _beating _me_, and how is this even_ possible_—), the inanity returns. He stops blocking life out. Everything becomes undone. Byers didn’t want this (Jonathan was always too soft and too kind—too _everything)_, and neither did he. He grins through the blood slipping down his face, pooling in his mouth, and remembers that if he had had a choice, he would have liked to be someone different.

An individual.

Somewhere along the way, that choice died. He dreamed a dream (hiding in the backwoods of Hawkins, Indiana at ten years old), but dreams are for children, and children don’t stay children forever.

Jonathan (that freak, that weirdo, that fucking _fag_) is still hitting him (wake up and remember, Steve—remember your dreams) and he does.

Steve spits out blood and tries to fight back but Jonathan’s fist connects with his cheek for an eighth time (ninth time, tenth time—) and Steve remembers. His dream (of a normal life, far away from here, from his family, a place where he wasn’t stitched together by sharp sutures of: _be a man_, _toughen up, boys don’t cry, you are a Harrington) _died the moment he called Jonathan a queer in the beginning of the eight grade. His compassion died alongside his dreams.

But all of this now—all of this was wrong. The entirety of everything in this moment—and yes that meant his friends hollering at them in the background too—needed to be burned to the ground.

“Jonathan—,” he manages to choke out. Another hit, another blow to the head. “_Shit, _my nose—,” The word ‘_stop_’ dies, unborn on the cowardly tip of his tongue.

He blinks and—

\---

He is seven when he meets a boy named Jonathan. Just Jonathan. Jonathan always smiles (and he is beautiful, the child of a sun-god with skin like warm porcelain and the eyes of an angel) and he belongs to him.

But his mother always told him that there was no such thing as heaven on earth, that nothing lasts forever, and that kids like Jonathan—well, he shouldn’t play with him. He’s not right, his mother says, smelling of bleach and blood, his family isn’t _right, _and Steve shakes his head furiously—his mother is wrong, _wrong!_—

He blinks and—

The air of Hawkins, Indiana was always heavy with rain and whispers of small-town mentalities and it will eat away at Jonathan, changing him like a chemical reaction. By the time he is twelve years old, he is no longer beautiful, but sad. He still smiles though, and this is what Steve loves the most about him. And later, when Jonathan pretends that he longer knows him, and his smile crumbles, this is what he’ll grow to hate.

Jonathan tells him many things with his sun-kissed smile (stupid things, funny things, things like his mom overcooked the roast last night and it was dry and gross, or he found a stray cat on the way to school this morning and fed it, so that’s why he doesn’t have a lunch—can I please have some of yours?), but the things he tells Steve when he’s _not _smiling, the things that are _not _stupid or funny, are the things that concern him the most. Like when Jonathan tells him that he will never do anything in his life that he ever wants. That he will always do the things that he doesn’t want.

“I don’t like my dad,” he says, eyes squinting into the brights of the sun. “But my mom says I have to love him anyways.”

“That’s stupid,” Steve tells him, kicking at the dirt.

“He’s family,” Jonathan says as if this should somehow mean something. “And you have to do the things that scare you the most. At least, that’s what my mom says."

And this frightens Steve. It makes him think. Because the Byers household is never quiet in the same way the Harrington’s is. The Byers house is fractured, held together by the angry intonations of an overworked mom, the slurs of a drunk father and the blinking confusion of a too innocent toddler. It makes Steve think, and when he does, he feels sick.

So he asks (or would like to ask): “....will you do what scares you the most?”

(Will you love your dad, even though you hate him? Will you stay silent even though you want to scream? Will you fight back?)

Because he can’t really see Jonathan, all of seven years old and wiry and thin, fighting. Not Jonathan. Beautiful Jonathan, Jonathan whose hands feel like comfort and sunshine, Jonathan who gives food to stray animals and picks worms off the sidewalk after it rains, and Jonathan who smiles even when he’s hurting.

He doesn’t ask.

But then Jonathan would go and say something stupid like: “Hey, Steve, that look on your face is making me sick: you look like my dad. Let’s go down to the river, okay?”, and he would think that Jonathan was the most stupidiest boy in the whole entire world.

\---

They’re ten and Steve now knows what his mother meant all those years ago. About Jonathan. About his family.

Jonathan is fading. With eyelashes that are far too long for his sharp, sad eyes, and cheeks that are far too pale, it’s as though all the warmth and happiness he’s ever had to offer is being pulled right out of him. Pulled and pushed into each and every touch he gives, pushed into his skin and holding together his smiles, his laughs, and all of it ringing back thick with falsities that pool out of his fingertips like a leaky tap. He isn’t happy anymore, but Steve, scared of what he might hear, doesn’t know how to ask why.

Then, the Incident happens.

He’s waiting for him on the sagging porch of the Byers’ old bungalow. Inside, there is movement—the muffled tumbling of footsteps and cut words, sliced clean by the sound of shattering dishes. The sounds get louder, and louder, and he shifts uncomfortably on the porch step. A quiet part of him knows this isn’t a simple conversation, but a full-on fight and Steve imagines the kitchen as the boxing ring. And Jonathan, lucky Jonathan, has front row seats with lifetime tickets, the match unfolding before his very eyes, front and centre.

Through the door, Steve can hear Mrs. Byers' screaming, her sharp, desperate tones overpowered by the booming waves of her husband Lonnie, and then more clattering, more broken plates.

He flinches when he hears a third player enter the ring, the desperate cries of Jonathan’s—“_Leave her alone!”—_pushing up through the din.

Minutes later, Jonathan emerges from the house defeated, tears hidden by the lengths of his dark eyelashes, a choked: “Come, let’s go. _Hurry_,” the only thing he manages to get out. His trembling fingers grab his arm—he can feel the warmth, _his_ warmth, and it’s draining out, pooling into his skin like fire—and he fiercely tugs him along towards their bikes.

They ride away into the thick of the backroads, feet pedalling as fast as the chains on their bikes will carry them. They ride and ride and ride, and they don’t stop until they are lost to the forests outside of town, safe and hidden by the thick foliage of the trees that line the banks of the distant Soosanee River.

Jonathan drops his bike in the dry, sandy dirt with a huff of sweat and tears. He tries to hide it from him—his face—and the angry red skin that crawls across the length of his cheek, leading to the slowly blooming purples that are swallowing his left eye whole. He buries his head in his hands as he drops to his heels in a low crouch, a loud and gasping huff of air the only thing coming from his mouth.

Steve doesn’t say anything. He drops his bike next to his and doesn’t say a word—he can’t, _he won’t_—he won’t acknowledge this terribleness, because nothing that he can say can fix this.

Instead, he drops down next to him, pulling him into a tight, unmoving embrace. He pretends in kindness that he doesn’t see Jonathan’s face and hides it for him, letting him bury himself in the crook of his neck as his shuddering gasps turns into thick, ugly sobs. Steve squeezes tighter, harder, and his fingers press into his shaking backside, trying desperately and hopelessly to shove some of that warmth back into him, to give him some of his life back, his happiness. Only Jonathan keeps crying and Steve knows very intimately, very despairingly that it doesn't work like that.

He lets him cry himself out and they stay in the woods for hours, guarded by the impenetrable swath of the Indiana forests. Here, they are untouchable. Here, it is just them. Here, they are safe.

It’s only when the sun begins to set, dipping low over the slow-moving curves of the river bends do they emerge. They walk back, hand in hand (right now, he doesn’t care what his father said)—they don’t bike; there’s no rush, no desire—and they find their feet dragging on the crumbly shoulder of the old back roads the closer they get to Jonathan’s house. Steve doesn’t let go of his fingers until they reach the end of his home’s driveway, the looming lights of the Byers bungalow in the distance setting his skin on fire with a crawling discomfort.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then?” Steve whispers in the dark, as though even now, out at the roadside, Lonnie could hear them.

Jonathan’s eyes flit nervously towards the house then back towards him, his teeth pulling anxiously at his lower lip. Without his hand to anchor the younger boy, he is unmoored and flighty, his feet shuffling aimlessly in the loose gravel, crunching stones with each tread.

“Yeah…sure,” he tells him distantly, quietly, and Steve nods, pulling him back into another quick, tight hug. As if to say _be brave. _Beneath his touch he can feel how fragile Jonathan is, how scared he is, like paper or porcelain, trembling like a leaf, and he lets go.

As he disappears into the dark, feet dragging him ever so unwillingly towards the house, Steve squeezes his eyes shut. _He’ll be fine,_ he thinks. _He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine, he’ll be fine._

He’ll be—

\---

Steve blinks and he’s twelve. His father had just told him fucking fags make him sick and if he ever catches one here in Hawkins, he’ll beat the ever living shit out of them. His mother still smells like bleach and blood, and their house is perfect and clean and quiet, only it’s getting worse and—

Well, he doesn’t want to talk about it.

He tells Jonathan though, about his dad hating fags, about his mom and the bleach (he doesn’t tell him about his dad’s affairs), but it’s like he doesn’t hear him. Instead, Jonathan tells him that Lonnie never touched him again after the Incident. _He’s never hit me since, _he swears. _I promise. _But his eyes, he’s noticed, are always focused on something else, some shadow, some blur Steve is unable to see. Every other day Jonathan comes running from the Byers bungalow biting his lip, half-angry, half-sad, and always crying.

_Boys aren’t supposed to cry_, Steve thinks. Boys are supposed to suck it up. Be tough. Fight back.

He’s not sure if Jonathan’s mother knows (she’s always working, always gone) but Lonnie lost his job at the mill six months ago, and he rarely leaves his spot on the couch.

_She must know_, Steve thinks. Because how could she not? Jonathan, her son, is still fading, still losing warmth, and he never takes his shirt off when they go swimming at the river anymore. Steve tries not to think about what that means, and how when they were younger he would let him go home in the dark to the shadows that waited inside. He thinks about how this made him feel: how his own fears and anxieties would bubble up and over and spill out of the vents of his ribcage when he watched the front door open and Jonathan slip inside.

“You’ll be fine,” he repeated to himself, over and over again. “Just toughen up. You’ll be fine.”

It was his own private mantra and prayer, said endlessly and ceaselessly and always in order to keep Jonathan safe.

But not now.

“Hey, Jonathan!” he tries one day after school, knocking on the front door. It’s okay to be here right now—ten minutes prior, as he hid in the brush near the end of the Byers driveway, he had watched Lonnie’s old Buick peel out onto the road (_to get more beer, probably, _Steve thinks. _Lonnie’s always drunk_) leaving behind a thick cloud of exhaust and squealing tires in the spring slush. “Jonathan?” he calls again through the door when no one answers at first. They were supposed to be going down to the river to watch the ice floes.

The door opens, but it’s not Jonathan who answers. It’s his younger brother, Will.

The kid is crying thick, ugly tears, his face a running map of snot and spit-up.

Boys aren’t supposed to cry.

“_S-Steve_—,” The words slip out in shattered syllables, sending a sharp pain through Steve’s chest. “H-help, _please_— he won’t get up, Steve, _he won’t,_ Jonathan won’t—,” and Steve knows that Jonathan is not fine.

\---

He finds Jonathan unconscious in the living room, his face a mess of rage and black eyes and swollen cheeks and broken bones.

He nearly throws up, but calls the Sheriff's Office from the old yellow Bakelite rotary phone in the kitchen, explaining frantically, quickly, not-so-quietly that Jonathan Byers is hurt—yes _hurt! _Really badly! Please, _hurry, _he’s barely breathing—no, he doesn’t know what happened (a lie—he knows, he knows, _he knows), _please send an ambulance, please, please, _please—_

Lonnie Byers is arrested and thrown into the county jail. His wife, Joyce, changes the locks on the door to the sagging bungalow and throws all her husband’s belongings into the snow filled driveway. Later, he packs up his things and moves to Chicago.

Jonathan spends nearly 6 weeks in the hospital, eating through a feeding tube with his jaw wired shut. And his nose, Steve thinks years later, never looks the same.

He sees him one last time before entering eighth grade, his last remembered image of Jonathan before the schism of their friendship laying stiff in a hospital bed in the spring, his face a fading canvas of grotesque yellows and dark red lines from sutras that had been used to knit his skin back together after the wires had come out.

He cried.

“I’m sorry,” he breathed, his voice paper thin and fraying. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, _I’m sorry—_

Jonathan had lost everything—his dad, his family, his dirty, awful little secret—all in that singular moment when Steve had picked up the phone. Hawkins, Indiana was a small town. Small enough that now not only Steve, but everyone else knew what Lonnie Byers had done. Some were even saying that his mother was at fault too. Because what self-respecting parent could have let that happen to their son? _Didn’t she know? How could she not? _She was being investigated by social services, and Will was staying at his grandmother’s house in Bresker.

“Don’t be,” Jonathan whispers. His voice was cracked and dry, scratchy like sandpaper from disuse. His hand snakes towards him and he curls his fingers into the cup of Steve’s palm one last time. “I should be thanking you,” he smiles, and Steve can see a broken tooth devouring his once beautiful smile. Steve nods and tries not to cry, but he cries anyways.

Jonathan’s words feel like broken glass, and when he fumbles to say his final, long goodbyes, he can barely feel the glaring whites of the brightening March sun, melting not only snow into puddles, but the frozen blood outside in the snow banks of the Byers home from when the Sheriff had carried the unconscious Jonathan into the ambulance.

When Steve goes home later, eyes puffy and red, his father hits him so hard that his vision goes white and his nose bleeds.

And that fall when he sees Jonathan on the first day of eight grade, he slips into the shadows of Tommy and Carol’s snickering—_did you hear? Jonathan’s dad beat the shit out of him. What a little bitch; what a coward—_

“Yeah,” Steve says, but his eyes are trained on the ground, unmoving. He thinks to them holding hands as little children. “What a fucking fag. Can’t even fight back.”

From then on, Jonathan pretends that he doesn’t know him.

\---

He’s crying again, for the first time in years. He screams and cries and bites down hard into the suffocating down of his pillow, trying his hardest not to be heard. His face is a mess of deep purples and sloppy reds, but he deserves it, he thinks. All of it.

He thinks about his life—his twin life, the life he wore like an ill-fitting tee-shirt over his old one. Like a sagging, second skin, trying and failing to be miserably _tough_ and _cool_ and yes, you got it: _a Harrington. _A real man. Men don’t cry. Men don’t _like _holding hands with other little boys or seeing them smile or want _desperately _to kiss them (kiss Jonathan) in the summer of seventh grade. Men pretend that you only like girls, that anyone who is different from you is weird, and that getting beat by your father was a sign of personal weakness. That you _deserved it._

Steve wants to throw up. Because he isn’t sure who belongs less: this new Steve who sneered at poor kids for wearing ratty clothes and faithfully pretended that his homelife is perfect, or the old one, who was too cowardly to fight back and speak up and was crushed by the weight of his father’s lofty albeit cruel expectations.

Neither of them are people he wants to be. Neither of them fit anymore. But he also doesn’t know how to fix it, or how to _move on._

His father comes home from work and Steve stays in his room. His eyes are puffy and red and his face is all fucked up and he knows that men (real men) aren’t supposed to look like this.

\---

“Hey,” Steve tries, puffing on a cigarette. Christmas had come and gone and Steve had gotten Nancy to give Jonathan the new camera he bought for him because he wasn’t quite sure how else he was supposed to do it. He was still figuring it all out—on how to be himself. Someone new. On how to be less of the labels that had nearly suffocated him for a better part of his young life, and how to be more kind again.

Jonathan is alone, leaving work from the theater, and he looks up, eying him warily.

“Hey,” the other boy parrots.

It’s cold out, the frigid January winds howling in the hills, the snow nearly too thick to drive in. He’d been standing outside the theater for close to an hour, shivering under the awning of the nearby pharmacy and all he really wants to do is to go home. But he’s trying, he’s really trying and he knows thanks to Nancy that Jonathan’s car broke down last week and that he’s been walking to and from school.

“Need a ride?” Steve asks.

There’s a moment of silence, just a few lost seconds really. And maybe it’s because he’s cold and his teeth won’t stop chattering, and maybe it’s because it’s wishful thinking, but for a fraction of those few lost seconds, he swears he sees the shadow of a smile on Jonathan’s thin, thin lips. The type of smile he hadn’t seen in years. And it makes Steve’s heart soar in his chest and it fills him with the sort of warmth he hasn’t felt since he was young, the biting cold around him be damned, because he’s missed this—he’s missed Jonathan—and he’s trying to get that back. Somehow. Someway.

He just needs to keep on trying.

“Sure,” Jonathan says stiffly, like he can’t quite trust him, like he doesn’t quite have a choice, but the snow is thick and he doesn't have a car, and Steve lights up. He’ll take it. He’ll take whatever he can get.


End file.
